Salesforce.com 2009 Annual Report Download - page 7

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Table of Contents
• Ease of integration. Our platform is designed to enable IT professionals to integrate our service with existing applications quickly and
seamlessly. Our Force.com platform provides a set of application programming interfaces, or "APIs", that enable customers and independent
developers to both integrate our service with existing third-party, custom, and legacy applications and write their own application services that
integrate with our service. For example, many of our customers use the Force.com API to move customer-related data from custom-developed
and legacy applications into our service on a periodic basis to provide greater visibility into their activities. Other customers and partners have,
for example, developed their own talent management solutions and procurement solutions on the Force.com platform.
• Rapid development of applications using the Force.com platform. Our customers and third party developers can develop applications rapidly
because of the ease of use and the benefits of a multi-tenant platform.
• Lower total cost of ownership. We enable customers to achieve significant upfront savings relative to the traditional enterprise software model.
Customers benefit from the predictability of their future costs since they pay for the service on a per subscriber basis for the term of the
subscription contract. All upgrades are included in our service, so customers are not burdened or disrupted by the periodic need to perform
system upgrades. Because we implement all upgrades on our servers, new features and functionality automatically become part of our service on
the release date and therefore benefit all of our customers immediately.
• Increasing innovation. By providing infrastructure and development environments on demand, we provide developers the opportunity to create
new and innovative applications without having to invest in hardware and distribution. A developer with an idea for a new application can log
onto our platform, develop, host and support their system on Force.com and make the application accessible for a fee to our customers.
• High levels of user adoption. We have designed our service to be intuitive and easy to use. Since our service contains many tools and features
recognizable to users of popular websites such as those of Amazon, eBay, and Google, it has a more familiar user interface than typical enterprise
CRM applications. As a result, our users do not require substantial training on how to use and benefit from our service. We conduct extensive
surveys of our users to gauge their experiences with our service so that we may determine potential areas of improvement. In addition, because of
the nature of our service, we receive constant, automated feedback as to which features customers use or don't use, allowing us to improve our
service based on this information.
Our Strategy
Our objective is to be the leading provider of CRM application services. We also want to be the leading cloud computing platform on which our
customers and partners build applications.
Key elements of our strategy include:
• Strengthening our existing CRM applications and extending into new functional areas within CRM. We designed our service to easily
accommodate new features and functions. We intend to continue to add CRM features and functionality to our core service that we will make
available to customers at no additional charge. We offer advanced editions for an additional subscription fee to customers that require enhanced
CRM capabilities. We have a growing portfolio of applications that serve different customer segments and markets. We also regularly evaluate
and execute acquisition or investment opportunities in complementary businesses, joint ventures, services and technologies in an effort to
strengthen and extend our service CRM offerings. We expect to continue to make such investments and acquisitions in the future.
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